The Deep Six

by Striker, Randy

  So this is it, MacMorgan. You knew the day would come. You knew the reaper would catch up and take you by the throat long before your contemporaries headed for their rest homes.

  Yeah, but not because of a slimy Castro Cuban like Ortiz.

  If he wanted me, he was going to have to work at it. What had he said?

  You Americans—either mentally soft or physically weak.

  We’d see.

  We were about a mile and a half off the Marquesas. The islands looked strangely safe, strangely comforting, in the moonlight darkness. Superior was closing in fast, vectoring in on us like a heat-sensing missile. They had all their running lights on now. Ortiz and the few men he had left felt safe, secure. In control. They knew where I was and they were about to take their revenge.

  Dammit, MacMorgan, think!

  There was no way we could beat them to the shoalwaters of the island. We would somehow have to fight it out out here. My brain scanned wildly for options.

  Jump and make a swim for it?

  Not with the girl . . . No, she would have made it. She was the swimmer. I had to admit it to myself—I was the one who wouldn’t have made it. Not with my ribs. I felt as if I was leaking blood, bleeding internally.

  “Jump for it,” I yelled to her. “Swim for the island! I’ll lead them away—”

  “I will do no such thing!”

  The beam of the searchlight had found us now. It swept by, then jumped back, holding us. The Superior came booming onward.

  “Do I have to throw your ass out of the boat, woman?”

  “Dusky, I’m not leaving without you—”

  I didn’t hear the rest of what she said.

  Because that’s when I saw it.

  A bright-orange buoy riding wildly in the sea ahead, caught in the shaft of searchlight. It marked something, and I knew exactly what.

  I had put it there.

  It was a long shot, but it was the only shot we had. I remembered the way they had looked on the bottom there: corroded half-globes, loosened by the current in the sweep of underwater river that plowed through the Navy’s forbidden bombing and strafing area.

  “Hang on, woman—and if you’ve still got it in you, give us a little prayer!”

  I gunned the Whaler toward the orange buoy. They were shooting at us now, the sound of their weapons like dull thuds behind us. I made Jennifer lie flat on the deck.

  Cut it close—as close as you can without fouling the prop. Make them follow, dammit!

  They followed, all right—dead over the old field of magnetic mines.

  It was a multiple explosion, the force so great that it singed my hair and almost blew us out of the boat. There were two dull, distant explosions, too—the shrimp boat and the salvage barge. Jason had set his charges well.

  The steel hull of the Superior was in bright scattered flames, raining down on the water. And something else was raining down on us, too. Small. Heavy. Metallic. In the light of the fire, I picked one of the objects and studied it.

  And suddenly I knew it all. I knew how Gifford Remus, my strange little friend, had died.

  And I knew why no one had ever found the Gaspar.

  The bottom of the Whaler was littered with gold doubloons . . .

  19

  It was one of those blustery December days. The kind that make the tourists wonder why they have left the cold of Ohio and New Jersey and paid all that money just to freeze their butts off in Florida. The wind roared icily out of the northwest, rolling a high stream of soot-colored clouds across the tropical skies, and palm trees, leaning in the gray wind, looked oddly out of place.

  It should have been a day for being depressed; a bleak day for bleak soul-searching.

  But it wasn’t that way. Not with this woman. And besides, I was suddenly very rich.

  Norm Fizer had come to visit me a month earlier in the hospital to give me the news.

  “You scarred-up old bastard,” he had said, smiling, mussing my hair as I lay in the sterile whiteness of sheets and chest brace. “The state permit we gave you as a cover is all of a sudden worth more than a winning ticket in the Irish Sweepstakes.”

  “Huh? Oh, that’s nice, Norm.”

  “We sent some Navy divers out to disarm the rest of those mines and torpedoes, and they said the bottom is just covered with the stuff.”

  “What stuff, Norm?”

  “Gold! Gold and silver and—”

  “Hmm. That’s nice.”

  “It’s just a theory of mine, but I figure when the Gaspar went down, coral started to build around it. A little reef started. You know how those fighter pilots are—especially those World War Two flyboys. On a practice mission, any strange shape is fair game. They started loading it up with torpedoes and .30 caliber, and it became the natural place to anchor the old scow targets. When those went down and the war was over, the Navy declared the area off limits. Too many old unexploded bombs. It was the only safe place to dispose of their old mines.”

  “I’ll be darned.”

  “So when the treasure hunters started nosing around out there, you can bet their magnetometers just went nuts when they passed over that area. But what did they see when they went down? Old bombs. A magnetometer can’t tell the difference between gold and old iron, so they just got the hell away and didn’t come back. Somehow that old man figured it out and started digging around. But he dug around one torpedo too many. Yes sir, Dusky old boy, you got money coming out the ears.”

  “What was that, Norm?”

  He put his hands on his hips indignantly. “Hey, what’s your problem, Captain? I stand here talking myself blue in the face, giving you great news, and you lie there like you’ve lost your best friend.”

  In a way, in a very strange way, I had.

  Two of them.

  First Wayne. And then Jason. Wayne had been a kindred spirit. He was the kind of guy I would have wanted my sons to be. And Jason . . . well, Jason was what the dark side of me could have become; what I had felt crawling around in my brain ratlike back in Nam. We were brothers of the same horrors, but polarized by . . . what?

  Luck, I guess.

  It happened to a lot of us, over there. In the jungle. If I had only been smart enough to see it in him earlier, and if I had only tried to get to him before . . .

  If, if, if . . .

  But Jason had realized too late. He had taken eight of them. The last three hand to hand. They found him dead, his hands around the throat of his final victim. He had been knifed in the stomach and chest and finally shot in the back.

  But at least he had realized.

  Surprisingly, none of his Christ’s Children had been killed. Two had been slightly wounded, and all had been sent to special deprogramming facilities in Des Moines, where, apparently, they were all responding to treatment. Not surprising, really. As Jason had said, they were the best and the smartest.

  But you can’t let the dead pull you into the grave with them. As long as your heart beats, you have to find a way of going on. I had learned that all too well in the past.

  “It’s over,” Norm has said, suddenly serious.

  “Captain Boone was a good man.”

  “And there but for the grace of God . . . I know what you mean, Dusky.”

  “Norm,” I said, “why don’t you take a couple of weeks off? I’m going to get an old pirate I know by the name of Yarbrough. We’ll go back to the Marquesas and all get rich.”

  He grinned. “I’ve got kids heading toward college age. I could use it.”

  “One thing, though. We each get ten percent. The rest will go to the veterans’ hospitals around, and to a special little charity I have in mind.”

  “And the charity’s initials are C.C.A., right? Sounds good. There were only those few who were in on Jason’s . . . plan. I’m afraid we had to check them out pretty thoroughly. So it’s a deal. Let’s all go get wealthy.”

  So we did. Even April came out to join us for a while. I kept kidding her about the dream she had
had.

  “Well, dang it, part of it came true—you were in the hospital!”

  It had been a pleasant time out there; the bad memories of the Marquesas and Fullmoon Cay coming only in the dark times; the lonely times when I slept alone on the flybridge, thinking. One night, April had come to me there. She didn’t want romance. She wanted to talk. It was funny the way she started. Very frank, very businesslike. When the time came, she wanted to get married, and she wanted to get married to me.

  “Impossible,” I had told her.

  And she had looked at me softly with her golden eyes. “You mean . . . you mean you don’t love me, Dusky?”

  I felt the lie catch in my throat, but I forced it out. “No, April. No, I don’t.”

  She watched my face carefully, saying nothing. And then she smiled. “You’re a bad liar, MacMorgan.”

  “And you’re pretty damn cocky, Miss Yarbrough !” I started to say something else, but she held up her hand.

  “Let’s just say we’ll stay in touch, and leave it at that.” She winked. “You’re a man an’ you’re gonna have your friends, and I might even have some of mine. But when push comes to shove, MacMorgan, you know the way it’s going to be with us. Someday.”

  And I had kissed her gently. “Okay, April. Someday.”

  So we had all returned to Key West rich. I contracted out the rest of the Gaspar to a group of professional salvage people on a percentage basis, and Hervey went back out with them to keep an eye on things. For the first time in my life, the figures in my bankbook were staggering. But money is both a blessing and a curse. It made me restless, nervous. So one day I went down to see a CPA friend of mine on Duval Street. I told him to stick almost all of my share into government bonds. Let the country use it to invest. And I didn’t want to know what the figures were or the interest rate was, and I didn’t want to see the income tax reports any longer than it took for me to sign them.

  That done, I made a call to the Midwest. The woman seemed happy to hear from me.

  Had the doctor helped her work out the problem?

  Yes. Completely.

  I was about to go on a little cruise. The realestate people had given me a list of secluded waterfront and private island property around the Keys, and I wanted someone to go along with me and give me advice.

  She would fly in within the week.

  I knew there would be no shyness about her. There wasn’t. When she wasn’t wearing her sleek swimsuit, she was naked, lolling about oiled on the deck when it was warm enough. And when it wasn’t warm enough, she was either puttering around, reading in the cabin, or oiled and ready, sleepy-eyed and wanting, beneath the covers of my bed.

  It was a good week of cruising and cold beer and long, long love. We even found time to look at property. I had admitted to myself earlier that the Sniper was a perfect boat for fishing, but it just wasn’t built to serve as a live-aboard for a guy my size. And I had to make a decision.

  It came down to two places. The first was a private island—twenty acres of island. It had high shell mounds and a citrus grove, and a deepwater channel for dockage. The house was built of Florida cypress with lighter pine beams, solid as a ship, on the highest mound, and it had four huge bedrooms and a fireplace.

  The second place was an old stilt house built in eight feet of water off a spoil bank near Fleming Key. It had only one small bedroom, but it was open and airy, built of paintless pine clapboard, and it had a bottle-gas stove and refrigerator for cooking, and a rainwater cistern for drinking and washing. But best of all, it had a long porch with water all around.

  So it had come down to this final night for me to make my decision. This last December night, two weeks before Christmas. The wind came roaring down from the northland, and clouds went streaming by in the pale winter dusk. The little alcohol stove had warmed the cabin and cooked our supper, and the woman had put coffee on to boil—for afterward. And now, hours later, we lay naked beneath the soft Navy-issue blanket, tired with our loving. Her breasts were exposed above the covers, flattened and round with their own weight, and she sipped at the coffee, sharing it with me.

  “Dusky, do you want my advice?” she asked softly in the weak cabin light.

  “That and more.”

  She smiled dreamily, her hair silken on the pillow. “I liked that house on the island. It’s so big and private, and you’d have room in case you ever wanted to . . . have someone come and stay with you.”

  I began to massage her stomach, feeling the warmth of her, and the heat of her thighs.

  “That little house built on stilts is too isolated for you, Dusky. It wouldn’t be good. You need people.”

  I rolled her over and began tracing the curve of her back and buttocks with my lips, feeling her legs lift and spread. She moaned softly and whispered, “Dusky, have I helped? With the island, if you ever wanted to marry again, you could . . .”

  She said no more, and I didn’t answer. She had helped with her advice; helped tremendously.

  A week after that good woman Fayette Kunkle returned to Chicago, sweet tears of love in her eyes. I gave the surly old owner of the property a check. He said to keep a close eye on the place during storms. He said the stilt house rocked like a boat . . .